Find Out the Speed You're Paying For

The first thing to do is check in with your ISP and see what speed you're paying for (if you don't already know it). In some cases, all you need to do is look at your most recent bill and the download speed and upload speed will be listed on it.

Advertisement

However, some ISPs like to hide this information away a little. If your bill lists something like, "Blast Speed," or "Roadrunner," then that's the tier you pay for. The only way to figure out the speed you're paying for is to head over to your ISPs web site and search through their package options (here are some helpful links for Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon, and Century Link).

You should now have an idea of the internet speed you're paying for, so let's do a speed test. Photo by BuddyBackupBlog.

Do a Simple Speed Test

The easiest way to do a speed test is with Speedtest.net (or at least it's our favorite tool for the job). All you need to do is click on the nearest testing area (usually the big green arrow), and click Begin Test. (For the most accurate test, make sure you're not downloading or uploading anything—for example, you may want to pause services like Dropbox.)

Let Speedtest run for a few seconds and you'll see your results. You'll see three different sets of numbers: Ping, Download Speed, and Upload Speed. The Ping is how long it takes for your data to make a round trip to the server, and we already know what the upload and download speeds mean.

Your download and upload speeds should be within about 1 or 2 Mbps as your advertised rate. If your speed test is a lot slower than what you're paying for—or, more importantly, you feel like certain types of downloads aren't fast—then it's time to check if your ISP is throttling you.

To test if BitTorrent is the cause, head over to Glasnost. Select "BitTorrent" from the menu and let Glasnost run through its process (it takes about 8 minutes). Glasnost will let you know if your ISP appears to throttle your speed during certain types of downloads. If they are throttling your BitTorrent traffic, check out our guide to speeding it up.

If they're not throttling BitTorrent, but your connection still seems slow, you might have reached a data cap. Some ISPs show you your limits in your account information, but it might be easier to call them and start hashing out why you're getting slower speeds. If you are exceeding your data usage, we've shown you how to monitor your usage to keep it from happening again.